Creative Writing Course – Week #8
Week 8 – the last class of the first term. Chapter 1 submitted.
I was randomly selected to read a section of mine, a daunting task when you've printed out the final version for submission and are then asked to read it out to a room full of critics – knowing that any edit suggestions can't be implemented, but it seemed to go down well, so I'm not too concerned. Too late now anyway.
It being the last class of the term, there wasn't much to feed back on from the previous class, as we'd all been editing our work prior to submission. In terms of editing, I didn't make too many changes, mainly due to the fact the bulk of the editing work was undertaken from the first time my chapter was seen by a tutor, with a few tweaks here and there afterwards. Another factor in not doing too much editing on it just before submission is that I wanted to avoid the 'point of diminishing returns' issue – where you work on something so much that you end up with less than you started out with. I feel that being 100% happy with your work is an unhealthy place to be, especially as a writer. If you think it's absolutely awesome, you can guarantee it's not.
Don't get me wrong, I read my chapter through a million times, read it aloud, printed it out, read it again, made comments in the margins etc, and pondered how it could be altered and improved. But ultimately I got it to where I was reasonably happy with, and released it into the wild. Fire and forget.
The remainder of the session focused on the state of the publishing industry at the moment, which inevitably slid into discussions about self-publishing and ebooks. I've been reading a lot about this recently, and have even dabbled with a Kindle-released short story myself, Unfamiliar Country, and a lot of what was said chimed with my own thoughts on the subject. JA Konrath's name inevitably came up in reference to self-publishing success stories, but these 'streets paved with gold' tales are always to be caveated by the knowledge that while success is possible, it's not the norm. The pros and cons of the self-publishing Kindle route can be left to other vastly more experienced writers, namely Konrath himself.
As it was the last class before Christmas, we adjourned to the pub to discuss all sorts of crap; writing, books, film and TV, and the suggestion that someone in the group should write a lurid sex scene which they can then share with the rest of us in one of the next reading-work-aloud sessions. Not that I was volunteering, I was merely making the suggestion!
Now that the first term has finished, there will be a lull in the week by week blogs about the course until the new year. To keep me ticking over I might post up snippets of my work in progress, just to prove to myself I am actually doing some writing!
